[Garbz (Chris)]

Hi All,

During Astrofest I was having a hell of a time with my EQ6 to the point of where I simply gave up using the C8 and stuck with ED80 and wider scopes. Some of what I was seeing can be logically explained by the gears hanging up, and my mount is now in many pieces because of that.

What I can't explain and had a few people scratching their heads is that during drift aligning I noted that my Dec axis was wavering. It almost looks like periodic error which is absurd as the dec axis shouldn't move at all. By all accounts I should be seeing a linear drift one direction or the other.

The screenshot below shows the results during a drift alignment session. During this time Dec guiding is disabled so you expect a linear drift in some direction.

I've ruled out seeing, 3 second exposures and the long time span should take care of that. I checked and triple checked that everything was tight although there is backlash in the mount. The period shown in the graph is about 8minutes long.

Any ideas what is causing this?